Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The Killer in Me by Margot Harrison

Hasn’t he lived long enough? Why not? I could take him like a thief in the night.This is how the Thief thinks. He serves death, the vacuum, the unknown. He’s always waiting. Always there.Seventeen-year-old Nina Barrows knows all about the Thief. She’s intimately familiar with his hunting methods: how he stalks and kills at random, how he disposes of his victims’ bodies in an abandoned mine in the deepest, most desolate part of a desert.Now, for the first time, Nina has the chance to do something about the serial killer that no one else knows exists. With the help of her former best friend, Warren, she tracks the Thief two thousand miles, to his home turf—the deserts of New Mexico.But the man she meets there seems nothing like the brutal sociopath with whom she’s had a disturbing connection her whole life. To anyone else, Dylan Shadwell is exactly what he appears to be: a young veteran committed to his girlfriend and her young daughter. As Nina spends more time with him, she begins to doubt the truth she once held as certain: Dylan Shadwell is the Thief. She even starts to wonder . . . what if there is no Thief?

Nina has been plagued with the life of someone else in her dreams. A boy she learned to get used to until he began to do the unthinkable. He became the Thief and killed people. All Nina has to do is close her eyes and sleep in order to see the unthinkable happen. And she's determined to get the victims justice.

Nina travels with her friend, Warren, across the country in search of this killer. She's going to out him once and for all. But when she gets to New Mexico and comes face-to-face with him, suddenly she's not so sure anymore. Could this ordinary family-man really be that vicious killer at night? Before she outs him, she's determined to test him to figure out if he really is the reason for her night terrors. But what is finally revealed in this story is so much more than just a serial killer.

Starting out with this story, I was super creeped out. It didn't help that I read this at night. However, once the story developed and the paranormal aspects came out (with the serial killer-ness), I was so engrossed. And the closer I got to the end, the more worried I became. I mean how do you create a perfect ending for this story? I'm not sure you can.